Since it was founded in the early 1980s, Milton Keynes College has aimed to prepare its students for the workplace, whether by getting their hands dirty mixing cement for a bricklaying qualification or allowing trainee hairdressers to hone their skills on paying clients.
But as vacancies in Britain’s technology industry hit the hundreds of thousands, the Buckinghamshire college at the geographic heart of the UK’s “golden research triangle”, which connects London, Oxford and Cambridge, is evolving to meet the needs of the fast-growing sector.
Last year, the college launched plans for a £25mn Institute of Technology, partnering with Microsoft on courses in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and data; a programme of digital skills courses for local employees; and a £3.5mn “skills hub” bringing nearby companies together with training providers.
The business-first strategy makes Milton Keynes College a “trailblazer” in the government’s push to “revolutionise” UK skills. Ministers want these innovative pilots to shape national policy and realise a new requirement that training opportunities must meet local employer needs.
College leaders hope enthusiasm for vocational training could rejuvenate a further education sector ravaged by a decade of cuts, but they are also wary of skin-deep reforms.
“It really is a one-stop shop for skills,” Julie Mills, the college’s principal, said of the hub, one of 18 partnerships between employers and colleges paid for by a £65mn government fund. “The on-the-ground intelligence about what skills are really needed now, the ability to work with employers on a workforce plan . . . It’s been really well received locally.”
Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, warned against a national strategy that was too focused on short-term projects and “digital stuff”.
Training providers and colleges already worked with employers, he said, and needed overarching priorities rather than local frameworks to do it better.
Last week, the government set out its long-awaited levelling up blueprint to help “left behind” parts of the country and address low productivity with a regional skills strategy at its centre.
While some education leaders welcomed the commitment to give local colleges more control over courses, others were sceptical that the plans would be resourced well enough.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, even recent government pledges will leave spending per pupil for FE colleges around 10 per cent below 2010 levels by 2024.
According to IFS researcher Luke Sibieta, even if investment does come it is likely to be after 2024 and a general election. “Can you make transformative change with lower budgets than 14 years ago? It’s incredibly unlikely,” he said.
Wide variations in further education and local economies across Britain meant not all colleges had the resources and leverage of somewhere like Milton Keynes, said Graeme Atherton, head of the Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up, a research group based at the University of West London.
“Colleges aren’t distributed equally across the country in terms of size and where they’re at . . . some colleges have resources and some don’t,” he said. “We always underestimate what’s needed to make the machine work.”
The challenges and opportunities facing further education — and the urgency with which they need to be addressed — are evident at the Hugh Baird College in Bootle, a satellite town of Liverpool with some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the UK.
At a new £3.9mn healthcare campus in a converted church, nursing and social care students practice their skills on state of the art mannequins that can be hooked up to heart monitoring machines.
“It feels like you’re in the healthcare sector already,” said 17-year-old Molly Bennett, who is studying for an extended diploma in health and social care. “You’re right there doing practical learning as well as theory in the classroom.”
Principal Rachael Hennigan, a former student at the college, wants to apply this approach to other areas such as technology, logistics or construction.
The vision is that each floor of the college would “replicate the work environments that our students will end up in”, with more input from employers about the skills they want, she said.
But realising that vision will mean addressing the funding crisis that has left Hugh Baird College’s 1970s building in need of cash, starting with £6mn-£8mn just to fix the windows and cladding, according to Matt Larkin, the college’s finance lead.
In total, the college is seeking to raise £30mn from a combination of the government’s £1.5bn FE capital transformation fund and other funding sources, including more commercial partnerships with local industries, such as the nearby port.
Raising funds commercially had become all but impossible, said Larkin, after lenders became nervous following a decade-long freeze in government funding for colleges.
Whitehall insiders said that as well as more cash, the government was working on reforms from September 2023 to help streamline funding and give principals greater flexibility to realise their visions.
The Department for Education said it was “committed to levelling up opportunity for people in all parts of the country to gain the knowledge and skills needed to unleash their potential”, including increasing total skills spending by £3.8bn by 2024-25.
“This will build on the investment we made in 2021-22 that supported education and training providers to meet the needs of local employers and communities and set up our new local skills improvement plans,” it said.
Mills is hopeful but so far unsure what the future holds. The principal acknowledged it was “early days”, with most of the pilots only at the enrolment stage. “It’s needed investment to get us to this point — the rest of the skills system needs to be there to sustain it.”
Colleges rise to challenge of tackling Britain’s skills shortage
Pinoy Variant